"I am sorry to have troubled you," he said. "When I inquired for you of Kedge and Reck some years ago, it was under the impression that you were some one else. You had left; and they did not know where to find you." "Yes, I had displeased them through arresting a wrong man, and other things. I was down in the world then, and glad to do anything for a living, even to serving writs." "You arrested the late Lord Hartledon for his brother," observed Mr. Carr, with a careless smile. "I heard of it. I suppose you did not know them apart." "I had never set eyes on either of them before," returned Gorton; unconsciously confirming a point in the barrister's mind; which, however, was already sufficiently obvious. "The man I wanted to find was named Gordon. I thought it just possible that you might have changed your name temporarily: some of us finding it convenient to do so on occasion." "I never changed mine in my life." "And if you had, I don't suppose you'd have changed it to one so notorious as George Gordon." "Notorious?" "It was a George Gordon who was the hero of that piratical affair; that mutiny on board the _Morning Star_." "Ah, to be sure. And an awful villain too! A man I met in Australia knew Gordon well. But he tells a curious tale, though. He was a doctor, that Gordon; had come last from somewhere in Kirkcudbrightshire." "He did," said Thomas Carr, quietly. "What curious tale does your friend tell?" "Well, sir, he says--or rather said, for I've not seen him since my first visit there--that George Gordon did not sail in the _Morning Star_. He was killed in a drunken brawl the night before he ought to have sailed: this man was present and saw him buried." "But there's pretty good proof that Gordon did sail. He was the ringleader of the mutiny." "Well, yes. I don't know how it could have been. The man was positive. I never knew Gordon; so that the affair did not interest me much." "You are doing well over there?" "Very well. I might retire now, if I chose to live in a small way, but I mean to take a few more years of it, and go on to riches. Ah! and it was just the turn of a pin whether I went over there that second time, or whether I stopped in London to serve writs and starve." "Val was right," thought the barrister. On the following Saturday Mr. Carr took a return-ticket, and went down to Hartledon: as he had done once or twice before in the old days. The Hartledons had not come to town this season; did not intend to come: Anne was too happy in the birth of her baby-boy to care for London; and Val liked Hartledon better than any other place now.